I love to wander through an ancient edifice in which generations of men have come and worshiped and found help and comfort. I like looking at the Viking ship, but I don't want to cross the Atlantic in it. Personally, I like to hear, to see, and to understand. The dim religious light and sonorous sounds do not waken me to a keener sense of the call of God to be up and doing. They just make me sleepy. Besides being difficult as a rule to hear, there is too much around to distract my attention. I don't think Westminster Abbey helps me personally to attend to the service. On the contrary, I think it makes me think of the building. I used somehow to imagine that service in the open air was necessarily associated with cant. Now I like it far the best. Not merely because it is more sanitary—till some one learns how to ventilate a building decently—but because it absolutely forces you to feel insignificant, and anxious that the great Creator should condescend to care about a mosquito like you. Moreover, I have often noticed out in the open a unity between those of different sects that was perfectly delightful. Meanwhile I am not unmindful that in many, if not in all, a deep inborn spiritual craving, no child of philosophy, is a powerful factor in helping men Godward. Also that many find their only help in authority and the faith of others. All these the Church has to provide for. It is no easy task to be prophet and conservative custodian at the same time.
The New and Better Spirit
One great trouble with tying one's self to any one church, from my peripatetic point of view, has always been the fact that so many other churches say, "If you are not one of us, you are against us." It is almost too personal to illustrate this from my own somewhat sad experience in my early days, but every worker in wide fields must have felt it. Jesus had specially to rebuke his own disciples for forbidding any man from casting out devils. For whatever his opinions, he must be on our side.
Thank God there is a new spirit entering the churches, a larger spirit! Only those can survive eventually who cultivate it. A spirit that wants to use every effort to raise humanity, and seeks a return for its outstretched hand, solely in the fact that it thereby grasps more of those of "his brethren."
The Only Right Way to Grow
This is the way for a church to grow. The more it exercises its muscles in pulling men out of their pits, the more dexterous, powerful, and altogether desirable it will be, because the world will need it, and it will no longer appeal only to those who prefer its form of worship or have a bias towards its particular church polity. The law of demand and supply should be recognized as applying equally to the church as to other agencies. The desire to be needed, to find work, and not merely to be a big party product can alone develop communions able to remove the stigma of being either parasites or fads.
If a church is really anxious to fulfil its functions as set down in the only book of instructions for each of them; if it wants to call forth latent energy, as a Washington from his homestead, or a Lincoln from his farm, it must cease to lay stress on orthodoxy and get to work where the world really needs it. A surgeon may be ever so correct in his knowledge of operative surgery, but he must find a practise or he is useless. It is not so much for holding services, as for rendering services, that the world is looking to the Church today.
Human Need the True Objective
Today the Church should not only have a message for the strong and well. In Christ's day it had a message for the sick and suffering also. I admit that the medical profession has neglected too much the influence that mind has over matter. It therefore frequently endeavors to treat a human being as if he was nothing but a conglomeration of material cells. But the Church, it seems to me, is making an infinitely more serious mistake in entirely abandoning the valuable aid it can give the physician when he has found that no organic cause accounts for the symptoms of his patient. What is known in America as the Emmanuel Movement has my entire sympathy. It is an honest effort of sane men to bring to the aid of physical sufferers demonstratively valuable spiritual influences.
The Minister only a Servant